🇵🇹 Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso was born on 14 November 1887 in Manhufe, a hamlet in the parish of Amarante in northern Portugal, into a prosperous and devoutly Catholic rural family of nine children. The landscape of the Tamega valley, its terraced fields and saturated light, would echo through his painting long after he left it. At eighteen he enrolled briefly at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, and on his nineteenth birthday in 1906 he set off for Paris.

He had gone to study architecture but quickly abandoned it for painting. Paris in those years was the laboratory of modern art, and Amadeo plunged in. He shared a building with Amedeo Modigliani, who became a close friend, and moved among the circle that included Constantin Brancusi, the Delaunays, Juan Gris and Alexander Archipenko. He drew caricatures, illustrated a portfolio of fantastical creatures, and began to paint with extraordinary speed and confidence.

His style refused to settle into any single school, and that was its strength. He took the faceted structure of Cubism, the dynamism and broken colour of Futurism, the raw feeling of Expressionism, and bound them with a decorative instinct rooted in Portuguese popular art. The results were canvases of pulsing colour and restless geometry that seemed to belong to no national tradition and to all of European modernism at once.

The year 1913 was his great public moment. He exhibited at the Armory Show, which travelled from New York to Boston and Chicago, and at the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon at Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, two of the defining showcases of the international avant-garde. A Portuguese painter, barely known at home, was being seen alongside the most advanced artists of the age.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Amadeo returned to Portugal and settled again near Manhufe. Far from stalling, his work entered its boldest phase. He incorporated collage, stencilled letters, fragments of mirror and sand into his canvases, producing some of the most experimental painting then being made anywhere in Europe. In 1916 he held two exhibitions in Porto and Lisbon that bewildered most local critics and delighted a small circle of fellow modernists.

He worked in something close to isolation, exchanging ideas by letter with the Paris friends he could no longer visit. The Portuguese art establishment was largely unprepared for him, and he sold little. Yet the intensity of the late work, painted in a country at the edge of the war and the modern movement, suggests an artist racing against a clock he could not see.

On 25 October 1918, in Espinho on the northern coast, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso died in the global influenza pandemic. He was not yet thirty-one. He left behind only a few hundred works, made in roughly a dozen years, but they amounted to the foundation of modern art in Portugal.

Recognition came slowly and then overwhelmingly. Through the twentieth century his reputation grew until he was understood as the single most important figure of the first generation of Portuguese modernists, the artist who proved his country could speak the international language of the avant-garde. A major retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2016 finally placed him, a century late, among the European modernists he had stood beside in 1913.